But “linkable assets” are not created solely to attract links. There are a ton of other benefits such as social shares, brand awareness, monetization, etc.

In this article, we’ll be looking at what types of content work well as “linkable assets,” how you can create such content yourself, and how you can earn links with them.

Let’s go!

What is a “Linkable Asset”?

A “linkable asset” is a piece of content purposely crafted with the intention of attracting links—usually from other websites in your niche.

Because people rarely link to commercial content, “linkable assets” are almost never product pages or commercial content of any kind.

Some people also create “linkable assets” with the intention of ranking for high-volume keywords. However, this only works if there is overlap between the topic of your “asset” and one or more high-volume keywords (which isn’t always the case).

Here’s are some of the other benefits of attracting links:

Increased organic search traffic (to other pages on your site): Linkable assets tend to attract a lot of “link equity” which you can then distribute to other pages on your site via internal links. This can help those pages to rank higher for their target terms.

Increased referral traffic: Links help people to navigate their way around the web. Thus, if you’re getting links from other high-traffic websites in your niche, referral traffic will likely increase.

Increased brand exposure and affinity: Imagine having your brand (e.g., Ahrefs) talked about on some of the most well-known, high-traffic websites in your niche. PR firms would charge you a small fortune for such a privilege. But this is exactly what happens when you create a popular “linkable asset.” This helps to spread the word about your brand and causes customers to associate your brand with cool things.

Here is one great example of a very simple “linkable asset” that performed well and attracted tons of links.

When this infographic was published, the number of referring domains shot up like a rocket!

This page now receives an estimated 1,500 visits/month from organic search as it ranks for some pretty juicy keywords.

You can also see a steady increase in sitewide organic search traffic since the infographic was published.

Sidenote.

We’re not claiming that this infographic was solely responsible for this increase in sitewide organic search traffic. We can’t say that. There are many variables at play. But it almost certainly helped.

But what makes a “linkable asset” so linkable?

First, you need to understand why people tend to link to things. If you can understand that, you can then start building “linking triggers” into your content.

Here are a few reasons people link to content:

It provides a solution for a specific problem;

It offers a unique angle towards a particular topic;

It backs up a point they’re trying to make (in their existing article);

But before we get to the asset “types,” it’s important to understand that linkable assets don’t attract links out of thin air—you need to promote them to make this happen.

That’s why I included a mini how-to guide to building backlinks alongside each linkable asset “type” below. 🙂

But you might still be wondering:

“Why should I create a “linkable asset”… can’t I just promote my “regular” content instead?”

Sure, you can. But here’s the critical point:

Linkable assets have a much higher ROI on your promotion efforts because they’re created with attracting backlinks in mind. Or, to put it simply, you’ll have an easier time building backlinks to a “linkable asset” than, say, an ecommerce page.

So, without further ado, let’s learn about the best types of linkable assets you can create (according to your goals and resources).

1. Infographics, GIFographics & “Map-o-graphics”

Infographics are still one of the most popular content formats when it comes to creating “linkable assets.” And it’s easy to see why: they can attract a lot of links.

Next, filter the list to show only results published in the last 12 months. And tick the “one article per domain” checkbox.

Sidenote.

You can choose a more recent timeframe if you like. But this will produce fewer results.

If you do this for the keyword “SEO,” you should now have a list of 130+ websites that have featured similar infographics in the last 12 months.

Reach out to these sites and pitch your infographic/map-o-graphic/etc.

QUICKTIP: DON’T LIMITYOURSELF

If your asset is high-quality enough, you could also trying pitching any sites that are interested in the overall topic. They may feature and link to it anyway, even if they don’t usually publish infographics.

Here’s another quick tip:

Remove all current filters (as outlined above). Then sort by the number of referring domains.

This is great for brainstorming infographic ideas that are likely to attract links.

“The 40 Most Common Link Building Mistakes,” anyone?

Or you could even “skyscraper” graphics that have a ton of links…yet aren’t so great.

B. Find PROVEN infographic concepts in other niches (then use them in your niche)

Even though it’s only been live for a few months, it’s already attracted a fair few links.

But here’s the thing: we never intended for this to be a “linkable asset,” and nor did we frame it as such. In fact, it’s just a regular ol’ blog post; we didn’t make it interactive or give out awards badges, we just created a list of ranked articles.

So why did this “work”?

Simple; because we have a good reputation in the industry. Thus, people were flattered that they made the cut. (At least this is what we think.)

Sidenote.

As this was so successful and well-received, we’re thinking of putting more effort into a similar piece of content and running some “official” awards in future—stay tuned. 🙂

Now, imagine that I instead published this same piece of content on my personal blog—a blog that’s been left derelict for over a year.

Do you think anyone would see this “award” as meaningful? Probably not.

NOAUTHORITY/CREDIBILITY? HERE’S A QUICKHACK

Find 100 influential people in your industry and create awards list based on their votes.

(This is similar to what we did with the list mentioned above with the best marketing articles. We surveyed the SEO/marketing industry and compiled their collective thoughts.)

It’s a simple trick. But it works 🙂

Here are a few good examples of awards/rankings with a ton of backlinks:

If this is the case, just let them know about their award/ranking and suggest that they “may want to add it to their awards page.”

Nine times out of ten, they’ll add it (along with a link).

B. Let fans of the people/websites that won an award know (using Facebook ads)

I‘m aware that I already covered Facebook ads (i.e., PPC) as a tactic in the last section.

But this is a deeper, more specific tactic that is better-suited to this type of linkable asset.

Here’s the deal:

Sometimes, the people you feature on your list of awards/rankings will share your post with their audience (as Ryan Stewart did with our list of the best marketing articles). But sometimes they won’t.

This is where Facebook Ads come in.

Under the “detailed targeting” section in Facebook Ads, search for the associated pages of the websites/people to whom you gave awards.

For example, ViperChill, Neil Patel, and Copyblogger were all featured on our list of the best marketing articles. So we could target fans of those pages on Facebook.

We could then run an ad like this to our audience:

This works because people who love, say, Glen Allsopp’s content (ViperChill) may be interested in reading similar material on other blogs, such as Ahrefs.

And if they ever need to recommend a good list of industry-related blogs or articles in future, they will likely link to your awards page.

4. Studies & Research

Studies and original research pieces attract links like CRAZY in some industries.

The SEO/marketing industry is a prime example of this. In fact, four of the five most linked-to pages on our blog are studies.

But why did these studies attract so many links? Here are two probable reasons:

People trust us: Ahrefs is a trusted and well-known brand in the SEO/marketing industry. So people trust our studies. The result: lots of backlinks.

We offer unique data and insights: Our business is based on data, so we have heaps of it. This gives us an advantage over our competitors—we can create data-driven studies using data that nobody else has access to.

But what if you’re not so well-known in your industry? And what if you don’t have heaps of data to play with?

Well, the good news is that you don’t have to base studies and research-type posts on insane amounts of data (like we do). In fact, personal case studies can also work well.

Leave the location as “In content” this time. No need to change it to “In title”.

Then sort the results by # of referring domains.

Look through the results until you find something promising. You’re looking for a study of some kind that’s out-of-date and has a ton of referring domains.

Here’s one:

Reperforming this study in 2018, then reaching out to everyone linking to the original would undoubtedly yield a ton of links.

B. Find people who are already talking about ideas that your study proves (then pitch your study to them)

Not everyone on the internet seeks proof before writing about a topic.

Case in point: the amount of time it takes to rank in Google.

We conducted a study on this a few months back. It proved very popular—in fact, it has already acquired links from hundreds of referring domains.

But many people have written about (and given then opinion on) this topic before.

Here’s an example:

These timeframes are based on nothing but the author’s personal experience—they aren’t data-driven numbers.

But let me ask you a question: do you think a link to our study would make sense in the context of that article?

Yes. It would.

Good answer 🙂 So what if we were to reach out to this guy to let him know about our study, and perhaps even suggest that he update his post to reflect our findings?

I guess the likeliness of him linking to us would be pretty high, right?

Well, let’s see.

On March 26th, 2018, I took my own advice and reached out to ReliableSoft’s Digital Marketing Manager, Alex Chris, with this email:

Two days later:

BAM! That’s a link—a juicy, contextual link! 🙂

Sure, he didn’t add it to the post I suggested, but a link is a link, right?

DISCLAIMER: I know what you’re thinking, “… but you work for Ahrefs; people likely want to do favors for you in order to build a relationship!” To an extent, this is almost certainly true—we can’t deny that. But, at the end of the day, we think that the “awesomeness” of your content is the primary indicator of success here… and awesome content is something that almost anyone can produce! So, if you aren’t fortunate enough to be conducting outreach on behalf of a well-known brand, make sure that your content is awesome and ‘linkworthy’. In fact, you should do that anyway, regardless of the brand you’re working for! 🙂

But anyway, you’re probably wondering, how do you find people talking about the ideas on which you based your study?

Simple; Google it.

I found this result by Googling the phrase: “how long does it take to rank in Google.”

Naturally, we rank #1.

But 90M+ more results are talking about this topic. These are all potential link prospects. (Again, read our web scraping guide to learn how to scrape these results.)

5. “Definitive” Guides & Tutorials

Most things worth learning are reasonably complicated.

That’s why so-called “definitive” guides tend to get a ton of backlinks. Bloggers and journalists would much rather link out to one definitive guide or tutorial than a bunch of different resources.

But to pull off a “definitive” guide, you need to be an expert on the subject matter.

That’s why our guides at Ahrefs perform so well when it comes to link acquisition—e.g., Tim’s outreach guide.

We’re a trusted brand in our industry with a lot of unique data and insights to share. That’s why people link to us.

Here are a few more examples of definitive guides (and tutorials) with a bunch of links:

To be honest, I’d say the word “update” does this guide a disservice—we’ve pretty much rewritten it from scratch twice. 🙂

Here’s how it looked in early-2017:

And here’s how it looked when initially published in 2015:

The result? A guide that’s always on the radar of potential linkers.

Just as people start forgetting about it, we refresh it and repromote it.

Here’s how this strategy translates to links:

You can see a clear spike in referring domains each time we updated this post.

But this didn’t happen by magic—it’s because we promoted it each time by:

Telling our subscribers: There are over 46,000 people on our email list. We let these people know whenever we issue significant updates to existing posts, which results in a lot of awareness.

Running Facebook ads: We spend $200–300 promoting our posts on Facebook whenever we update them. Sometimes we target existing fans of our brand. And other times we’ll run retargeting ads (or even target a cold audience).

Performing outreach: Never overlook the power of outreach. We perform a fresh round of outreach whenever we make big updates to posts. This isn’t really about asking for links outright (although we sometimes do); it’s more about staying on their radar and letting them know about our content.

Sidenote.

Everything mentioned above works for tutorials, too. For example, if you have a HTML tutorial, make sure to update and repromote it whenever HTML6 gets released.

B. STEAL links from less “definitive” guides

If you’re putting a lot of work into creating industry-leading guides (as you should be), then your guide is almost certainly better than most other guides on that topic.

So let me ask you a question: why would anyone want to link to an inferior guide?

Answer: they wouldn’t.

But because your guide didn’t exist until now, they had no choice but to link to a less definitive guide. However, if you tell them about your new, better guide, chances are they will link to yours instead—thus, you can steal links from less definitive guides.

6. Coined Terms

DISCLAIMER. I saved this type of linkable asset until last for a good reason: coined terms are VERY hard to create and pull-off. BUT, it can be done. If you’re successful at creating such a term that manages to gain significant traction, well, you won’t be short of links for a while!

Coined terms don’t need much of an explanation.

They’re terms which, before their authors coined them, didn’t exist.

Perhaps the most famous example of this (in the SEO industry, at least) is the “skyscraper technique.”

For anyone that’s been living in a cave for the last five years, this is a link-building technique coined by Brian Dean. It has a ton of backlinks.

It also continues to attract more and more backlinks as time goes on. In fact, it’s not unusual for this page to draw links from 50–100 new referring domains in a month.

Most people write guest posts solely for the links (yes, you typically receive a backlink from your published guest posts). But in my opinion, this is a shortsighted tactic. You can use guest posts for so much more.

For example, you could write a guest post for a hugely popular website in your industry (e.g., Ahrefs) and mention your coined term in that post.

Because the post will likely receive a lot of traffic, this will help to popularize your coined term.

And as your coined term increases in popularity, so will the number of links you attract.

So how do you find high-traffic industry blogs on which to guest post?

These kinds of terms usually result in a LOT of junk: Low-quality or unrelated sites, PBNs with “write for us” pages that were created solely to attract those desperate SEOs willing to pay for links, etc.

Many sites that don’t have “write for us” pages still accept guest posts: We don’t have a “write for us” page, but we still accept guest posts 🙂

Sort the resulting list by “traffic,” and you’ll have a list of sites that accept guest posts with a ton of traffic.

Mention your coined term on one of these sites and awareness will skyrocket.

Final Thoughts

Wow. That was a long one!

But before we wrap up, I want to mention a couple of important points.

Firstly, I should stress that many of the tactics above will “work” for numerous types of linkable assets.

E.g. you can use guest posts to build links to and raise awareness of any kind of asset, such as tools or studies. And you can do the same with Facebook ads.

I tried to highlight the tactics that work best for each type of asset above. But as you can see, there is some crossover, so don’t be afraid to get creative.

Secondly, you likely realized that a lot of the tactics above focus on letting people know about your “linkable asset” above all else. This is because “linkable assets” are precisely that—assets that people WANT to link to.

Thus, your job is to make sure that the right people (i.e., those in your industry that have the power to link—the “linkerati”) know your asset exists.

Remember, you could have the best asset in the world, but unless the right people know about it, you won’t get a single link.